


Flutter

by muldertxf



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-21 18:53:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14291214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muldertxf/pseuds/muldertxf
Summary: wrote a little thing while listening to club music. set in season 2 or 3. scully’s at a nightclub after a particularly stressful week of work…





	1. Chapter 1

               The music pulses to a cryptic rhythm, tangling shadows and clustering voices until there’s nothing left but soulless bumping and crashing. Her glass jars from her grasp and shatters mutely on the flashing floor. The anxious silhouettes jiving about her don’t break stride, and so the remains are skittered and crunched into stardust. She doesn’t bother to bend for it.

               The bar is open, she orders another.

               There’s a couple, there, in the corner of the room. Two women—the taller one looms over a blonde and they smash lips, staggering backward violently. They vanish into a black stripe that crosses over the floor and wall. Her drink is here. The glass’s condensation feels too crisp to her already clammy palms and she grips the drink, downs it, exhaling with a cough.

               Her hair’s carefully mussed; It is not parted with surgical precision tonight, and it almost falls down the middle, colored pink and streaked with magenta by night neon. Her lungs ache from all the running she’s had to do today, but she is here nevertheless. This is well deserved, she tells herself. Dangling one leg off the grimy stool, she steals one underneath and looks out in the crowd. Longs for someone to crawl from the disco of flaring lights and  _notice_. Her lips don a stark plum.

               And then he’s there.

               Her breath is caught behind three glasses of alcohol and she fumbles as he approaches and makes eye contact with the bar tender. Her face boils, and the world keeps bopping around her. She grips the counter to avoid falling into the floor, as if it might crumple like eggshell. Her mind, a cerebral ball of yarn, begins to uncoil behind her ears. Mulder doesn’t recognize her. Scully knows it’s him. His gate, the hastily shed work coat over one shoulder.

               Maybe it’s the light, and so she tucks herself further into a shadow pocket. Scully lingers on the possibility that maybe this is his usual getaway. Is she the invader? Scully’s surroundings swell with a charged ineffability. Someone strikes a match nearby and his eyes spark with it. It is the light, she thinks, and unfolds herself from the side of the bar stool. Mulder wields promise like he does his gun and doesn’t even know it.

               He nearly jumps, his eyes falling almost immediately to her lips. She draws back her hand, rests it on her lap. She smiles playfully.

               “… _Wanna dance_?”


	2. Chapter 2

                Scully labors over the movements studiously, lodging her eyes firmly on the crest of Mulder’s right shoulder where her own hand rests. There’s a nimble, white pin stripe that bows over it; forward and back, and it seems magnetized to their pull. She steals one look at him, and his eyes are riddled black. So, she goes back to staring at her palm. It’s all she can do to maneuver this trapeze.

                There’s a wooden awning over the bar, with strips of balsa that band even lines from one pillar to another. It smells quixotically antediluvian—this place was built only a year or two ago. The wood could have been imported, she thinks, eyeing its pillars that wear tiny indents from the seeming pass of time. She shakes her head, as the bright pin stripe slides like ribbon from his shoulder. The structure’s wet, wooden smell drifts away from them.

They sidestep further from the bar stools and spirit shelves whose contents harbor an almost phantasmal presence, while second hand smoke stretches between them like stadium fog. If this place had a smoking section, it was fruitless. The bar was not crawl-space, but it also was not exactly endowed, spatially speaking. She thinks this as her heel knocks into a chair leg.

It was funny—the thought that she had come to escape her crazy coworker and sit with a nice drink on a weekday evening. Now, Scully was dancing, drink forgotten, and with him. She never does this. It’s special, and yet he’s here. The far off look in his eyes makes her uneasy; this almost seems planned.

“Mulder,” Scully mutters just above the music. Of course, she had to ask him. “What on earth are you doing here?”

Mulder levels her with a hard look, then eases as they fly out the door and into a quiet D.C. street. The lamp bathes them in orange and shocks the darkness lavender.

“I was going to ask you the same,” Mulder says, white breath pluming. He looks around, edges closer and lowers his voice. “Someone…uh, this guy was supposed to meet me here an hour and half ago for a lead on some abductions I’ve been curious about. Scoped the place, and it’s, just. Well, dead water.”

“He was a no-show?” Scully asks.

He sucks in his bottom lip. “Yeah.”

There’s a long silence, except it’s not awkward and she’s grateful for lack of his verbal probing. It’s obvious why she’s here.

“God, where do you find these people, Mulder?” Scully finally asks, her smile wearing into her voice. He was a man who would trust no one yet believe anything. “Who was this man?”

Mulder shakes his head, begins walking down the cracked sidewalk. “Doesn’t matter, Scully,” he replies, his back to her. She follows him. “I had doubts about him anyway, but it was worth a try. Sorry to intrude.”

“No, you didn’t…you didn’t intrude, Mulder. I was surprised to find you there if anything. But not offended,” Scully reassures. He keeps walking. “Mulder. Do you need a ride?”

There’s a pause, and he slows, turning to face her once more. His smile is tired, and the shadows exaggerate his bags. One car rumbles on by, and despite the city setting, despite being a few literal steps from a bar, being out here with him feels oddly pastoral. Some stars peek from their astral perches, flicking dimly. The world is emptied, save for them.

She drops him off and drives home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a couple people on tumblr wanted more, and so I did the best I could. it was fun to write.


End file.
